Richard Williams (1933-2019) was born Richard Edmund Williams on March 19, 1933 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Williams, a Canadian-British animator and director of animated films, was active from the early 1950s until his death. He developed an interest in animation at the age of five, when his mother took him to see SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937). After a brief career as a fine artist, Williams returned to animation, working at George Dunning’s company, T.V. Cartoons Ltd., in the mid-1950s before winning a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Animated Film for his first production, THE LITTLE ISLAND (1958).

The critical and financial success of his next animated short LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME (1962) enabled Williams to establish his own studio, Richard Williams Animation Ltd., where he and his staff alternated between working on personal projects and commissioned work, averaging over one hundred forty television commercials, film title sequences, and other works per year. He gained wide acclaim for the titles and bridging sequences for THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (1968), a United Kingdom feature film directed by Tony Richardson.

Williams’s work on his seminal film THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER began during this period when he illustrated “The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasruddin,” a collection of Sufi folk tales written by the British author Idries Shah. This collaboration evolved into plans for a feature-length animated film. Williams’s working relationship with the Shah family ultimately dissolved, but the filmmaker continued to work on the project over the next two decades using the money earned from his commercial work to self-finance what had become his passion project.

After winning a special achievement Academy Award for the animation direction of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988), Williams signed a deal with Warner Bros. to finish THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER, but the project was seized when he missed a deadline in 1992. The Completion Bond Company that insured the film’s financing hired Fred Calvert to oversee completion. Under Calvert’s direction, the film was edited, re-structured, and finished by animation studios across the United States, Hungary, and Thailand, without Williams’s involvement. It was released in Australia and South Africa under the title “The Princess and the Cobbler” in 1993, then re-cut and released in the United States under the title “Arabian Knight” in 1995. Williams never watched any of these released versions of his film.

Richard Williams earned over two hundred fifty international awards throughout his career, including three Academy Awards. In addition to his special achievement Academy Award, Williams also received Oscars in the Short Subject (Animated) category for A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1972) and for Visual Effects, together with his colleagues Ken Ralston, Edward Jones, and George Gibbs, on WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988). He is also known for his seminal animation textbook, “The Animator’s Survival Kit” (2001), which has been turned into a DVD box set and an iOS App in the years since its initial publication. Williams received his final Academy Award nomination for his animated short film PROLOGUE (2015) and was in the process of completing a related feature-length adaptation of "Lysistrata" when he died on August 16, 2019 in Bristol, England.